This body of work began as a nod to Rabelais, a French author from the 1500s who wrote about bodily topics such as food, sex, defecation, and slapstick violence in comical ways that might appear gratuitous. Some literary theorists claim that his grotesque humor deliberately maintains a tradition from medieval marketplace carnivals where an emphasis on bodily functions, orifices, and appendages—in contrast to the mind or soul—restored a sense of kinship among the masses.